who tells your story
by kearlyn
Summary: She was supposed to die on Jedha when the Empire destroyed her home. She survives and escapes and lives on. But the story she tells in not her own. It's her brother's. It's Bodhi's.
1. who lives who dies

_Once, not so long ago and not so far away, there lived a very special boy in a very holy city._

 _His name was Bodhi._

Asmi Rook is supposed to be there when the Death Star fires on the Holy City of Jedha. NiJedha is her home, and has been for her whole life. Her family has lived there for eight generations and likely would have been there for eight more if it hadn't been for the Empire.

It's the only place she can see her brother in the little time the Empire allows him away from his work. She hates it, seeing Bodhi so worn thin, his spirit more crushed by the Empire each time. She wants to tell him to leave, to come with her and run from the Empire as far as they can go.

But she doesn't.

They both know that they have no choice.

 _The Holy City is a sacred, special place, home to an ancient temple of the Force and a site of devout pilgrimage for worshippers across the galaxy._

 _The boy Bodhi is not a pilgrim, though, or a Jedi. He is just a boy living with his sister and their mother in the shadow of the temple._

 _He has little, as a child. Few in the Holy City are wealthy._

 _But he has his family and food to eat and a roof over his head and his dreams of the stars._

 _And so he is happy._

 _And so his happiness is infectious. He has smiles for everyone he meets and he is kind to a fault. He loves the world, and everyone in, from the biggest, gruffest Guardian of the Temple to the scrappy orphan girl in the marketplace who doesn't know how to stop fighting._

 _Bodhi is kind and loves and is loved._

 _And so he is happy._

But she's not in NiJedha when the giant machine moon looms large on the horizon.

She's not there when the beam of green fire destroys the Holy City.

She's not there when dust and rock spew thousands of miles in every direction, destroying everything in their path.

She's not there when Bodhi Rook, dragged back to sanity and freedom by a rebel with a kind heart, emerges from Saw Gerrera's base and realizes that he'd never left Jedha at all. That the heaving wall of debris roiling towards him had once been his home. His people. His sister.

(She doesn't know this, of course. She'll learn it later, from the mouth of a Partisan soldier who tortured her brother.)

Instead, she's 300 miles away in the tiny desert village of Tissan helping a childhood friend with his sick baby. She feels the ground roll under her feet and can almost imagine she hears the moon scream.

As she huddles with the other villagers, staring at the cloud of debris blotting out the horizon and moving steadily towards them, deep in her heart, she knows.

 _Oh Bodhi_ , she thinks, and begins to pray.

 _The boy Bodhi is happy — they are all happy — until his mother dies and the Empire comes._

 _After that, everything changes._

 _Happiness drains away from the Holy City as the Empire's great ship casts a shadow across their moon and the Empire's soldiers take and take and take. And the people grow sad and desperate and scared._

 _Bodhi is sadder and more desperate and more scared than most._

 _Without their mother, he and sister have less than nothing and they struggle every day to survive._

 _But they cannot let their weakness show outside the walls of their tiny home._

 _The Empire senses weakness like a predator pursuing prey, and they would not survive that attention._

 _Bodhi thinks they will be alright, but then the Empire cracks down again and suddenly even the most generous of the Holy City's people have no more little scraps of jobs to offer two starving orphans._

 _Bodhi and his sister huddle together on their roof, staring up at the Empire's giant shadow and know there is only one thing left to do._

 _They join the Empire._

She is lucky to get off Jedha alive, she knows. One of the moon's pilgrim tourists is a rich man with a personal ship who comes for an experience he can share on the holonet. To get the genuine _experience_ he has decided to walk a short ways in the desert and as luck, or the Force, would have it, his ship is parked right outside the village when Jedha is destroyed and big enough to carry them all.

(He doesn't save them out of genuine kindness, she knows, but because he wants to be able to tell people about his act of selfless generosity. He wants to make the story of her moon's destruction and the death of her people instead the story about how he was so lucky not to have been in the Holy City and how kind he was to rescue a poor group of villagers.

Asmi has met his kind before.

A small part of her despises that she only survives because of one of the pilgrim _tourists_ that Jedha's natives _hate_ so passionately, and that he turns the genocide of _her_ people into _his_ story. But the rest of her is just grateful to be alive.)

As they rise through the atmosphere, she stares back at her dying moon. The weapon that killed them is long gone, but as tectonic quakes shake the moon apart, she realizes that the Empire doesn't care.

It wasn't about the destruction of the moon.

It was about the destruction of the Holy City.

She swallows around the sudden tightness in her throat and _knows_.

 _Oh Bodhi_ , she thinks, _what have you done?_

 _I can hear you gasp. I see your shock._

 _Why would a child of the Holy City, a boy as bright and kind as our Bodhi, join an evil as terrible as the Empire?_

 _This is a Truth most of the galaxy will never admit._

 _Sometimes good, kind people are forced into terrible choices they would otherwise never make. Sometimes, good, kind people do terrible things because they don't think they have any other option._

 _The Empire was a terrible thing for Bodhi. It gave him his dream to fly, to see the stars. But living in the heart of their darkness, watching them take and take and take from everyone they could, began to break something in Bodhi._

 _He grew quiet and listless and alone._

 _He was alive but he wasn't living._

She's not even looking for the first piece of the story when it finds her in a dingy refugee camp on Coltraz.

"I heard he stole something from the Empire," says a voice from the corner, rising above the noise of a group of Jedhan refugees debating why the Empire would be hunting Bodhi Rook in the days before Jedha's destruction.

Hidden in her own dark corner, Asmi tenses and narrows her attention on the barabel who spoke. He sounds like he _knows_ , she thinks.

"Stole something?" one of the men asks, confused. "Why would he do that?"

The barabel shrugs. "Maybe he wanted to tweak the Empire," he says, then pauses. "Maybe he wanted to turn traitor. Join the Rebellion."

 _That_ sets off a round of speculation that takes a long time to resolve. The rest of the refugees seem to agree that there was no way Bodhi Rook, loyal Imperial pilot, could turn traitor to the Empire, even if he was a local boy.

But to Asmi… well… that sounds _exactly_ like something Bodhi would do if he had the chance.

 _Oh Bodhi_ , she thinks _, where are you? What did you do?_

 _And so Bodhi begins to doubt. He knows the Empire is wrong, but he thought he could live with it. He thought if he put his head down and survived, it would be alright._

 _It isn't and Bodhi doubts. He doubts when he sees the Temple of Jedha stripped of its kyber. He doubts when he runs supplies to Imperial outposts on distant moons and sees their people starving and down-trodden. He doubts when he hears another decree stripping non-human sentients of their rights._

 _He doubts._

 _And those doubts grow from unease gnawing at the back of his mind to a sickness in his stomach every moment of every day that he is surrounded by the Empire. Bodhi has nightmares when he can sleep at all. He stops enjoying food. Books and the holonet no longer capture his attention. Even the small card and dice games the other pilots, mechanics, and soldiers play on their downtime are no longer things he could even force himself to enjoy._

 _And every moment of every day, he doubts._

 _Doubts that he had made the right choice._

The thing that killed their world was called the Death Star. _Was_ because the Rebel Alliance destroyed it in the skies above Yavin IV.

Asmi's feelings about it are… complicated.

She is viscerally and viciously pleased that the thing that killed her world, her people is gone. But she can't be happy without knowing what happened to her brother.

She thinks she knows that Bodhi and the Death Star are connected.

Bodhi had done… something.

Something big, so big that even Imperial officers in the backwater Rim planet that the refugees have been shunted to know his name and say it with bitter disgust. Like the Imperial officer slumped over his third drink at the end of the bar, slurring angrily about _that damned pilot_.

Asmi sets a fourth drink down in front of him and braces her elbows on the bar.

"Tell me all about your troubles," she croons gently.

The officer tosses back half his drink with a deranged laugh, and tells her about an Imperial science station called Eadu, a scientist named Galen Erso, and the quiet pilot who befriended him then disappeared days before rumors began to circulate that someone at the facility had betrayed them to the Rebellion and that Bodhi Rook had been the messenger.

"G'len Ersho," the officer slurs, "betrayded ush. But that pilot…"

He growls and tightens his hand around the glass.

"Kriff that pilot!" he shouts and throws the glass across the bar. It smashes into the head of a trandoshan and in moments the bar devolves into an angry brawl, the Imperial officer crushed in the middle.

Asmi ducks under the bar to wait it out with a smile on her face.

 _Oh Bodhi_ , she thinks, _what_ _ **have**_ _you done?_

 _One day, Bodhi meets another sad, doubtful man. They are nothing alike, Bodhi and this man. He is an Imperial scientist, their best and brightest, working on the Empire's grandest project. And Bodhi is Bodhi, a low-level cargo pilot who wishes more and more to be completely invisible._

 _But they see the same thing in each other: they both doubt the Empire._

 _It is the scientist who makes the first move, speaking gently to Bodhi about doubts and atrocities that cannot be borne and the chance to make it right._

 _But it is Bodhi who asks, scared and determined, "What can I do to help?"_

 _The scientist gives him a message and mission, and Bodhi goes with the scientist's words echoing in his heart._

 _He can make it right._

At a tiny bar on Kafrene, a barabel drops unceremoniously into the seat across from her. It's the same one, she thinks, as from the refugee camp on Coltraz.

"Heard you're looking for a pilot," he growls. "A very particular pilot."

He offers her a tiny device that she recognizes intimately. She takes it gingerly from his scaled hand and flips it open. It's exactly what she thought it was: an Imperial holographic ident card.

But the face on it…

It's Bodhi.

"Where did you get this?" she asks, staring at her brother's face.

"On Jedha," he says, "from an Imperial pilot looking for Saw Gerrera."

 _Saw Gerrera._ She knows that name. She looks up warily.

"You're a Partisan," she says quietly. Involuntarily, her free hand presses against her thigh where, years earlier, a Partisan bomb in the market had shattered all the bones in her leg. Imperial medicine had helped her walk again, but never without pain or a limp.

The barabel bares his teeth at her. "And you're Bodhi Rook's sister."

She feels cold. She's worked so hard to hide that part of her identity because the Empire is never kind to the families of people they consider traitors.

"How do you know that?" she asks softly.

"You learn so much from a man pushed past his breaking point," he says, and for a moment Asmi doesn't understand.

But then she does.

Torture. _Bodhi_.

She feels white-hot rage unfold in her chest.

This… thing… had tortured her brother.

With deliberate care she tucks Bodhi's ident card into her shirt pocket, then draws her blaster and props it on the table. The whine of a full, deadly charge is just barely audible over the noise of the bar, but the barabel clearly hears it.

His eyes focus on it and he sits up warily. He shoots a glance around the bar, but Asmi has chosen her location with care. The other patrons either don't notice the blaster or don't care.

"Now," she says, "tell me what you did to my brother."

 _So Bodhi Rook carries the scientist's message across the stars, looking for a great warrior to help him. But what he finds instead is an old man, tired from long years of war, who won't — can't — believe Bodhi because he's an Imperial pilot._

 _Never has Bodhi so cursed that terrible symbol on his uniform._

 _He tries and tries to tell them of the message._

 _It's important. It could stop the Empire. They must know._

 _They don't, won't, believe him, and determined to find the truth of the Imperial spy, the force Bodhi Rook, the pilot who is just trying to do the right thing, to face a creature that tears into your mind and soul and drags the truth into the daylight._

 _It leaves broken men behind it, even if they have no lies to hide._

 _And so it left Bodhi, lost and alone, in the terrible darkness._

She's on a passenger freighter headed for the mid Rim when the dreams find her. She can never quite remember the details when she wakes. Only enough to say that they are of Bodhi surrounded by friendly faces and bathed in a brilliant glow.

Bodhi, who is laughing, and smiling and happy and _free_.

Bodhi who is loved.

Bodhi who turns to her and smiles at her with a mix of heart-breaking love and heart-breaking sadness. Bodhi who gathers her in his arms while she cries and loves him back.

It is only months later, when she finally learns of Bodhi's fate and the fate of his crew that she realizes that they were more than dreams.

They were a goodbye.

 _Do not fear, gentle listener, for though Bodhi was trapped in darkness, sometimes it is in the darkest places that we find the things we most desperately need._

 _This is true of Bodhi, for in the darkness he found more heroes like himself. Heroes that would carry him onward in his quest._

 _A woman who burns like a star._

 _A rebel soldier with a kind heart._

 _A guardian who stands tall in the face of all threats._

 _A man who_ _ **sees**_ _though his eyes are blind._

 _And a metal monster with a living soul._

 _In the darkness they come together and together they fight free of it._

 _And fight they must, for as they emerge from their dark prison they find that the Empire has come nipping at their heels. The Empire has come to the Holy City._

 _And there is nothing brave Bodhi and his companions can do but bear witness and flee as the Empire destroys the sacred city._

The only time she ever plays on both her identity as a former Imperial _and_ as Bodhi's sister is with Elias Granden, a man she recognizes as one of Bodhi's fellow cargo pilots. He'd been the only one who was friendly with her brother.

It gives her hope that she finds him piloting civilian passenger freighters, not Imperial cargo shuttles.

It doesn't take him long to recognize her.

"I almost couldn't believe it," he says, "when I saw him come out of the rain. We'd been told he'd gone missing on Jedha, and then he shows up on Eadu in the middle of a rebel attack? Wasn't hard to put the dots together."

Bodhi had apologized to his fellow pilots, Granden tells her, even as he'd held them at blaster point, locked them in a storage room, and stolen a shuttle.

"It saved our lives," Granden says. "When the base fell down around us, being locked in that room saved our lives. Can't hate Rook for that, even if I hate him for everything else."

 _But hope is not lost, for the woman who burns like a star has heard the message Bodhi carried, a message of a weakness worked into the heart of the Empire's machine of death._

 _Across the stars they fly, to find the scientist who sent the message and carry him back to the Rebellion so the machine can be destroyed._

 _But they are too late, for the Empire fears its traitor and the Rebellion fears the machine's architect._

 _The scientist dies, his mission incomplete, and its weight passes to his daughter, the woman who burns like a star, and to our pilot Bodhi._

On Etiara, she kidnaps, Nower Jebel, a former senator and current figurehead for the rebel movement on the planet. She finds him alone and unprotected in the capital city's marketplace and has to shake her head at the lack of operational security even as she shows a blaster between his ribs and drags him front the street.

He's scared, she sees, and won't believe a word she says about not being an Imperial, so she doesn't bother trying.

Instead, she flips open her brother's ident card and makes sure Jebel can see his face.

"Bodhi Rook," she says. "Talk."

He takes one look at the gun and does, babbling about a message from Erso, a mission to Jedha, an attack on Eadu, and an impassioned speech that the Rebellion ignored. For Bodhi Rook he has only disdain and suspicion, an Imperial defector who could never stop belonging to the Empire.

"Your boy helped us get the plans to destroy the Death Star," he admits reluctantly. "Of course, he also helped get half the fleet destroyed and got _himself_ killed doing it."

There's a roaring noise in her ears and a leaden weight in her belly.

"He's dead?" she whispers.

Jebel sneers at her.

"Yes," he says, "so it doesn't matter what kind of spying he came to do."

 _He's dead._ The words echo inside her. _Bodhi's dead._

She'd known it was a possibility. _She'd known_. But she'd hoped…

She wants to ask _when_ and _where_ and _how_ but she hears the thundering of boot steps drawing ever closer. The planet's rebellion come for their figurehead, she thinks.

Time to go.

It's only when she's alone, hours later, that she lets herself truly feel the news.

 _Oh Bodhi,_ she thinks, and weeps.

 _They turn to the Rebellion, for who else would help them destroy the Empire's machine? But the Rebellion does not trust easily, especially not the words of a former Imperial and the daughter of the man who built the machine._

 _They refuse to fight._

 _This is, I see, a surprise to you, gentle listeners, for you have all heard the tale of the Rebellion's brave assault on the Imperial Scarif and their heroic attack on the Death Star._

 _But here is the truth. In the beginning when the scientist's daughter and the Imperial pilot begged them to fight, to find the map the scientist had made to the machine's weakness, the Rebellion chose instead to run. To hide. To surrender._

 _And so our pilot and the scientist's little star went on their own, with only the help of their brave warrior friends and the rebel soldiers who wanted to make their sacrifices and the blood on their hands_ _ **mean**_ _something._

"I served with him," he says. "I was there. On the beach. When he…"

Stordan Tonc, Rebellion Pathfinder, is a small man with haunted eyes, but his smile is kind. She finds him on Felucia, in the aftermath of the Rebellion's campaign to free the planet from Imperial control.

He tells her of the assault on Scarif, the intricate plans, and the desperate gambles. But mostly, he tells her of the pilot, scared and untrained but willing to run out into the middle of a firefight to do what needed to be done.

"I'm sorry," he says, "that I couldn't save him."

His gaze is distant, watching something long ago and far away.

"Bodhi Rook was a good man," he says, "and he died brave."

 _Their quest is desperate. A small band of brave men and women against an entire world of Imperial might. And still they fight. They fight on the beaches and in the woods and in the Citadel._

 _They fight and they die because every step they take carries them closer to their goal._

 _This story has a happy ending, gentle listeners, for this tiny band of brave rebels succeeds in their quest. They find the map and send it flying out to the Rebel fleet that has found their courage and followed the lead of the brave men and women below._

 _But our story also has a sad ending, for though they were brave and fought hard, though they succeeded in their quest, they all perished doing so. The guardian and the man who sees. The metal monster. The soldier with a kind heart and the woman who burns like a star._

 _Bodhi Rook, the pilot._

 _Dying to complete a quest they believed in._

She tells her brother's story everywhere she can — in bars, in school rooms, in refugee camps, over camp fires and minimal rations. She tells his story so people will know, and remember, the little boy from Jedha who dreamed of touching the stars and made a choice that saved the galaxy.

She tells his story, because as long as it lives, her brother lives too.

 _This is not a sad story, gentle listeners, for though our brave pilot Bodhi passed on into the light of the Force, his legacy lived on._

 _He fought for the Rebellion, who went on to destroy the Empire that ruined so many lives._

 _He won his quest to find key to the weakness of the machine of death, and because he did, the brave pilots of the Rebellion destroyed the weapon that killed his world._

 _And he lives, to this day, in our hearts and in our stories._

 _All I ask, gentle listeners, is that you remember Bodhi Rook, the boy from Jedha who flew to the stars and destroyed the darkest among them._


	2. who tells your story

Wedge Antilles knows the story of the destruction of the first Death Star. He should; he was _there_ after all.

(And for the destruction of the second, its debris still lighting up Endor's sky above them. But who's counting.)

But as he sits at the back of a small band of rebels and ewoks listening to one of the Rebellion's support personnel tell the story of Bodhi Rook, he realizes that maybe he doesn't know the story as well as he thought he did.

The woman weaves the story with the skill of an expert, giving depth and colour to the footnote of martyrdom that Rogue One has become for the rest of the galaxy. Wedge has always known _about_ the tiny crew that threw itself against the Imperial might at Scarif and, against all odds, pried the Death Star plans from their grasp.

But he'd never thought about them much beyond the hurried briefing he'd gotten before the Death Star's arrival at Yavin IV and in the aftermath their memorial had become just one of the many.

Now, hearing their story, hearing Bodhi Rook, fellow pilot and fellow Imperial defector, come to life as a real person, Wedge is ashamed by that ignorance.

So he sits at the edges of the light from the campfire and listens and feels a fierce regret that he never got to know any of that crew. He thinks he would have liked them.

He hopes they would have been proud of what the Rebellion has done with their work.

The Reconciliation Commission is marching into its third month, and for the first time Leia is sitting in the public forum instead of the formal judiciary space.

It had been Luke who'd suggested and then fought for the Reconciliation Commission to have space dedicated to allowing the general public to share their stories. Most of the Reconciliation Commission was hearing testimony from carefully selected sources — the Empire's victims _and_ its servants. It was meant to provide a venue where victims could be heard and criminals could be punished, and the slowly growing New Republic could be reminded of the horrors that came before.

Luke had argued that the commission would never have the time to hear everyone's story and that the need to hear testimony from some of the most impacted and worst offenders would leave no space for the ordinary person to tell their story. The New Republic, he agreed, needed to hear the long, bloody history of the Empire.

But the people should have a space to tell their stories too — the stories too little for the formal judicial proceedings, the stories that didn't need cross-examination and visual evidence.

Leia, already feeling daunted by the weeks of scheduled testimony stretching out before her, had been reluctant to agree. But Luke had been so fierce in his argument and had asked for so little else in the wake of his victory over Vader and the Emperor, that Leia had given in. She'd convinced the rest of the committee organizing the commission to find a public space for Luke's forum, then left it in her brother's hands.

Three months later she was, for the first time, sitting in the back of the forum and listening to the stories being told.

And it's been a startling reminder that the Empire didn't only have heroes and villains. It had ordinary people with ordinary jobs, who were both cruel and kind, but on an individual, not galactic scale. The stories she hears are not of planets destroyed by superweapons or entire populations forced into slavery, but of the regular people who struggled to figure out how to survive and to live with themselves within the Empire.

Another woman gets up to speak and Leia finds her attention caught. The story that this woman tells isn't hers, but she weaves the story with beauty and emotion. And the more Leia hears of the story, the more it begins to sound… familiar.

The woman too looks familiar to Leia's eyes, but not someone she can name.

Maybe a rebel Leia has seen on one base or another?

Then the woman speaks of a terrible message, a rebellion that wouldn't listen, and a desperate quest to finish a scientist's mission, and Leia suddenly knows exactly what she's listening to.

This is the story of Rogue One.

She already knows it — of course she knows it.

But she has only ever known it in brief, in the hurried mission briefing Captain Antilles had gotten before their ship was dispatched from Alderaan, in the single line of background given to the Alliance's pilots before their run on the Death Star.

As the preface to her story, and Luke's story, and Han's story.

She feels a little sick.

Rogue One and Scarif and the theft of the Death Star plans was the Alliance's first major victory, but the story is only ever told as the opening to the bigger, grander tale of the destruction of the Death Star itself.

No-one tells the story of the people behind that mission and how they came to be running it.

Leia sits in the back of the forum and listens and burns it into her memory.

This, more than any other story she's heard is this space, speaks to its value. A value she had allowed herself to overlook.

It's a reminder that behind every line of the history they are writing, there are dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions of people whose stories _aren't_ being told. There are ordinary people with ordinary lives who struggled to survive and to _live_ in the Empire. Who had families and friends and faced hard questions about themselves. Who were _people_ , not heroes and villains.

Leia vows never to forget that and never to forget Rogue One and Bodhi Rook.

Poe Dameron first hears the story of Bodhi Rook as a child. At only six years old and full of energy, his parents often find it difficult to keep up with him. (He knows, because they've told him so many times, always with smiles and tickles.)

What he loves more than anything, though, is when his _mamá_ takes him up flying with her.

So he's incredibly disappointed when his mother tells him that instead of going flying, they're going to listen to a story.

" _¿Por qué, mamá?_ " he whines.

"Because _mijo_ ," she says, "it's a very special story about people who helped save the galaxy."

She must still see the mutiny on Poe's face because she tickles him stomach and says, "The hero of this story is a pilot."

Poe laughs at his _mamá_ 's tickles but thinks about her offer.

" _Vale_ ," he says finally, "I like pilot stories."

 _Mamá_ kisses his cheek and hoists him onto her hip and they set off for the town square where Poe is surprised to see how many people have gathered.

All other thoughts are quickly driven from him mind though as he listens to the woman weave a story of a brave pilot who helped steal the plans for the Death Star. As the story closes, he tugs anxiously on his _mamá_.

"You fought the Death Star, didn't you _mamá_?" he asks.

He's trying to be quiet, but he hasn't mastered what his _papá_ calls the "inside voice" so most of the square hears him and turns to look. Poe ducks down to hide from the scrutiny, but _mamá_ just laughs and confirms that, yes, she flew against the Death Star.

Of course Poe wants to hear the story. (And so does the rest of the square.)

So that's how Poe gets _two_ pilot stories at once.

He can barely contain his glee.

He thinks, later, as he and his _mamá_ are walking home, that he liked Bodhi Rook's story. But that his _mamá_ 's will always be better, because his _mamá_ is the best.

(Two years later, Poe hears the story from Asmi Rook for the second time when she returns to Yavin IV for the ten-year anniversary of the destruction of Alderaan and the first Death Star.

His mother has been dead for only four months.

And this time, he doesn't hear it as a story about a pilot having a grand adventure. He hears a story about a man who lost nearly everything but carried on anyways. A man who _made_ something triumphant out of tragedy.

 _If Bodhi Rook can do it,_ he thinks _, so can I_.

He still spends the night curled up in the Force-sensitive tree outside him home remembering his mother and wiping away the tears.)

Storytellers are rare on Jakku. While there are many who love to boast of their triumphs and skills, there are few who come with education and poise to weave stories of the stars.

The woman sitting under an awning in Niima Outpost is one such person. Behind her, a battered freighter belches dark smoke as a group of the crew crawl over and through her hull. Engine trouble, Rey diagnoses with a glance. She may only be as tall as Unkar Plott's waist, but she knows ships and that one is having engine trouble.

Probably something with the fusion actuator.

It explains why these people are on Jakku.

They must not have had any other choice.

For a moment, Rey wants to creep over to the ship and watch the crew work on her repairs, but the midday sun beats relentlessly on her exposed skin and the shade under the woman's awning looks cooler at least.

The woman isn't alone under her awning and her audience looks to be a mix of more of the ship's crew and passengers and Jakku locals (who are, of course, standing at the back and trying to pretend that they aren't listening).

As Rey creeps closer, Rey hears the woman mention a boy living rough on a desert world with only his sister and his dreams of flying, and her attention is caught. As the story unfolds, Rey is carried away by it and by the brave pilot who made difficult choices and found a family and helped save the galaxy.

 _I want that_ , she thinks, and just for a moment, her dream is not that her parents come back for her, but that something happens and she gets to fly away from Jakku, gets to race across the galaxy fighting to save it from evil, and finds a new family of her own.

The next moment, she is horrified by that wish.

Her family _is_ coming back for her.

And wishing for anything else is… is… a betrayal of that and betrayal of them.

Rey is a _good_ girl. She's going to wait and _not_ dream of other things.

It's a beautiful story, Rey can acknowledge that, but she doesn't stay to try to speak with the storyteller.

(By the time she meets Finn and BB8, and fights rathtars and Knights of Ren, and travels to Takodana and Starkiller and D'Qar, Rey had nearly forgotten the story she heard as a child. It lingers only in the feeling, embracing Finn in the corridors of Starkiller and fighting a desperate fight to destroy it, that _this_ is what she really wanted all along.)

Five days after he wakes from his coma, a small woman with greying hair and kind eyes sits down next to Finn's bed and introduces herself as Asmi Rook. She asks him how he's doing and tells him that General Organa sent her to answer questions about the history of the Resistance and the Rebellion before it.

He wants to ask, desperate to know a part of history that the First Order would rather see expunged from all knowledge. But there's something he needs to tell this woman first.

"I was a stormtrooper," he says, watching her face closely.

She nods and doesn't seem surprised. "I know," she says. "The General told me." She pauses and a tiny smile quirks the corners of her mouth. "I think the whole base knows by this point."

He grimaces a little and ducks his head. He's not going to hide his history, but he's not sure how he feels about that many people knowing him and his past.

(That's a lie. He knows exactly how he feels. Scared out of his kriffing mind. In the First Order, that much attention was _very_ bad for a person.)

"You're not the only one, you know," Rook says.

Finn blinks at her and she smiles.

"You're not the only one who's ever defected," she says. "Granted, you're our first from the First Order, but by the end of the last war, half the Rebellion was made up of defectors from the Empire, and many of us are still around."

 _Us_ , he realizes. _She said_ _ **us**_ _. Is she…?_

She sees his question and nods. "I used to work for the Empire," she says.

"Why did you leave," he asks.

"Not for anything as brave as you," she says. "They forgot about evacuating me when they destroyed my planet and killed my people. And I just… never went back."

She smiles at him, but Finn can see the old pain in her eyes.

"My brother, though," she says, "he was more like you. He defected from the Empire trying to save the galaxy."

Finn shakes his head. "I was just scared," he admits in a small voice. "My first mission, they wanted me to kill innocent people, and I couldn't. So I ran."

"Because it was the right thing to do," she says. "You rescued a Resistance pilot, completed his mission, and helped the Resistance destroy Starkiller. Seems pretty brave in my book."

Finn is… not sure he's ready to accept that, even if it's what Poe has been telling him, and the General, and everyone else he's met so far. He's maybe starting to believe it, but also thinks he's going to have to do _a lot_ to be worthy of it.

"Your brother," he says, trying to get away from that uncomfortable conversation, "what did he…?"

"Bodhi," she says. "His name was Bodhi, and he helped destroy the first Death Star. Would you like to hear the story?"

Finn nods, then listens in awe as she weaves a story of bravery in spite of fear, hope in the face of sadness, and a desperate band of heroes who sacrificed everything for what they believed in. But most of all, he listens to the story of a man like him who tried to do what was right, no matter how afraid he was.

 _Bodhi Rook was a hero_ , he thinks. And not like many of the Rebellion heroes Poe has told him about, who stride like legends of light through the history of the fall of the Empire. A hero who came from somewhere like Finn, who did the right thing even though he was scared, and even though much of the rest of the galaxy has forgotten him

 _I want to be like Bodhi Rook_ , he thinks and doesn't realize he's said it out loud until Asmi Rook laughs beside him.

"He would have liked you," she says and Finn smiles.

Asmi Rook passes away peacefully in her sleep nearly a year after Snoke is finally defeated and the First Order dismantled. She'd been determined to live long enough to see it happen and defied her illness and every doctor's prediction out of sheer stubbornness.

But now the galaxy is finally settling into what she hopes will be a permanent peace and new people have stepped forward to tell the stories of the galaxy's heroes — big and small.

So Asmi lays herself down and finally stops holding so tightly to the mortal coil.

She's not expecting much.

The light and warmth that curls around her is a welcome surprise. She feels connected to everything in the entire universe and simultaneously an incredibly small speck within it. She is lost for moments on end in the light's joyous song.

Something — someone — coalesces out of the light wrapped around her.

She no longer has the senses to perceive as she did when she was in a body, but she knows who it is immediately.

"Bodhi." She's not sure if she speaks it (if she even _can_ speak here) or somehow shoves the tangled memory perception of her brother out into the light spectrum, but he hears and knows.

"Asmi." It's a burst of light and sound and image that somehow conveys her and her name and everything Bodhi feels for her.

"I missed you," she says.

His laughter is a rainbow of light.

"I've been watching you."

And she sees a flicker of images, her always her, speaking and listening and speaking.

"You told my story," he says, and there's awe in dusky purples and gratitude in warm oranges and pinks.

"You deserved to be the hero," she says and the light curls around her.

"Come on," he says. "There's people you should meet."

She doesn't have to guess who. As she floats away with him, stretching her _self_ across the stars, she bears little thought for what she's leaving behind.

Except…

"You have to tell me all the bits of the story I missed," she says and Bodhi laughs, because she knows her brother better than that, knows that no matter how many people she spoke to, how many versions of the story she got, Bodhi would always be the only one with all the pieces.

She'd done her best to tell it as best she could and now she can curl up in the light and let her brother tell his own story.


End file.
